What I did before the holiday started
So, if you've been following along, you know that this year I've been taking part in National Parks on the Air here in the USA. I've been having a lot of fun doing it, but mainly as a chaser. I did one activation of Grand Teton National Park/John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway back in March, and I've been wanting to do another activation since then.
Yesterday morning, I went over to Sagamore Hill, the home and "summer white house" of President Theodore Roosevelt, right here on Long Island. The weather was a little iffy, and kept threatening to rain, but I thought that I could get a couple of hours operating in. Now, I've tried unsuccessfully to activate Sagamore Hill before, so I know that it's OK to set up a small radio there. I saw that there was a large canopy over the picnic area and thought some event might be going on. It turns out that they have it there all summer, and despite some minor confusion about if I needed a permit (I didn't) it was fine for me to set up a small radio and portable antenna.
The challenge for me was that I decided to do this as a CW activation. Now, my Morse code isn't very good. I can probably go up to about 10 words per minute on a good day, but I decided to go a little slower than that. It's difficult, because it's very easy for me to miss letters.
The first contact that I got was Emily KB3VVE, a fellow member of the Facebook NPOTA group and after that, they were a pretty constant stream, once every minute or two for next hour and change. All in all, I had 26 in the log for the time I was there, and I'm pretty pleased with that. Operating conditions weren't great. Radio propagation is iffy these days (the other reason that I wanted to do CW), so I went with my more powerful radio rather than my standard 5W. Contacts ranged over the eastern 2/3rd f the United States, plus one in Ontario, Canada.
I'm looking forward to going back there again before NPOTA ends in December.
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